How this medication became 50 times more expensive overnight in the US

Lately, there has been a lot of of interest over a new drug to cure Hepatitis C—a disease that’s surpassed AIDS in number of death since 2007.

Sovaldi, a medication produced by American pharmaceutical company Gilead, has a 90% success rate in treating the disease compared to a 50% success rate of the other existing treatments.

But the reason why Sovaldi is at the center of the public arena isn’t its efficacy, but rather its cost in the US. A full course of a 12-week treatment of Sovaldi costs $87,000—or $1,000 a pill—a price tag that generated outrage, and a hearing on Dec. 3 by the Veteran Affairs Committee on the cost of the drug since the disease occurs three times higher in veterans than the than the general population.